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Learning to love the body you live in

Bryony Gordon

For all of my adult life, and a great deal of my non-adult life, too, the worst thing you could have described me as was ‘‘fat’’. Fat was worse than stupid; I would rather have been called ugly or incompetent or weak.

Fat was pathetic. Fat showed a lack of self-control. Fat was the fate worse than death I’d heard my mother and her friends talk about as they picked at Ryvita and thin air.

I always felt fat, even though I was nothing of the sort - it was more of a state of mind than anything else, a way of threatening myself so that my BMI never tipped over 24 (the point at which you are classed as ‘‘overweight’’ is 25). I see this self-torture all the time in friends. ‘‘Oh God, I’m so fat,’’ says a woman so thin she has to cling to a can of Diet Coke for support. Because as females, it is far more acceptable to feel bad about ourselves than it is to feel good.

But I really am fat now. I weigh something like 95 kilograms and my dress size is an 18. I can no longer shop with any ease on the high street, unless I fancy wearing a Zara handbag as a glove or a Topshop belt as a hairband. I got really stuck in to the terrifying world of being overweight when I became pregnant. ‘‘Did you have any cravings?’’ someone once asked me, to which the only honest answer was: ‘‘No more than usual – I just allowed myself to give in to them.’’ And I have been giving in to them ever since.

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When I tell people in a sing-song voice that I am fat, I almost always see a frantic battle going on behind their eyes as they try to work out what to say to me. Inevitably, it is: ‘‘But you’ve just had a baby!’’ ‘‘No I haven’t,’’ I respond. ‘‘I had a baby 14 months ago.’’

‘‘Well ...’’ is just about all they can come out with before blushing beetroot (Yum! Beetroot!) and changing the subject. It is sweet, really, their desire to comfort me, but they needn’t bother - the vast plates of pasta I indulge in are comfort enough.

Anyway, after all those years of fearing fat, I now find it rather wonderful. Perhaps I have a sort of reverse body dysmorphia thing going on. Maybe I am simply high on sugar. But since I allowed myself to become overweight, I have never, ever been happier. It could be the things that have come with the obesity that have done it - the husband, the baby - but I think it is also because I have finally been freed from the constraints of giving a fig what anyone else thinks of my body. I don’t waste any more than two seconds wondering if my bum looks big in something. It does, and what of it?

Of course, the big anti-fat argument is that if you are obese, you are far more likely to die - of heart disease, of diabetes, of being mown down by a bus because you are too slow and lumpen to get across the road in time. A new book by a cardiologist is now challenging that. In The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier, Dr Carl Lavie argues that being underweight is more of a problem than being overweight. Furthermore, the obese might enjoy significantly lower mortality rates than their ‘‘normal weight’’ counterparts.

‘‘Fat has been demonised by our society, and our research shows fat is not always the devil,’’ he says. ‘‘You can be heavy and amazingly healthy. Fitness is a lot more important than fatness.’’ Diets, which cause our weight to fluctuate, are the real enemy.

If I compare my lifestyle when I was slim with my lifestyle now that I am fat, there is no question as to which is the healthier: it’s the one that has made me overweight. During my 20s, I binged, purged and starved myself. I was shockingly cruel to my body. I deprived it of carbs, nutrients and affection, and chain-smoked my hunger pangs away.

Now I eat three meals a day and occasionally drink lashings of really good wine. When I had a recent check-up, the doctor was astounded to discover that I ranked in the top 3 per cent health-wise. Stick that in your skinny decaf latte and drink it!

Honestly, when I see the misery involved in being thin I am astounded that anyone bothers. ‘‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’’ was that unforgettably stupid comment attributed to Kate Moss. I have a 25-year-old colleague who said it would be an ‘‘honour’’ if I mentioned in this column the greatest compliment she has ever been given: that she looked really rather ill (‘‘Nobody wants to look well! Well means you need to lose weight!’’).

Then there’s the friend who was so obsessed with her weight that she told me she only put on a pound for each month of her pregnancy. ‘‘You treat your body like an amusement park!’’ she exclaimed one day, as she watched me shove back a packet of crisps. To which I wanted to respond: yes, and I’d rather that than a prison camp.

I don’t mind being called fat - what I mind is people throwing it out there with the express purpose of belittling (ha!) me. I am not ashamed of being fat, not one bit. Call me chubby, pudgy, a porker, whatever - I will simply take it as a sign that my body looks like one that has been loved and lived in, rather than loathed.